Spear takes stab at Olympics

Jennifer Gish

Updated 10:14 am, Thursday, July 12, 2012

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 26: (L-R) US Olympic team fencers Jeff Spear and Tim Morehouse attend the Team USA: Britain Bound party at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on July 26, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 26: (L-R) US Olympic team fencers Jeff Spear...

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 26: (L-R) US Olympic team fencers Jeff Spear and Tim Morehouse attend the Team USA: Britain Bound party at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on July 26, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 26: (L-R) US Olympic team fencers Jeff Spear...

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 26: (L-R) US Olympic team fencers Jeff Spear and Tim Morehouse fence at the Team USA: Britain Bound party at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on July 26, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 26: (L-R) US Olympic team fencers Jeff Spear...

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 26: (L-R) US Olympic team fencers Jeff Spear and Tim Morehouse fence at the Team USA: Britain Bound party at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on July 26, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 26: (L-R) US Olympic team fencers Jeff Spear...

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 26: (L-R) US Olympic team fencers Jeff Spear and Tim Morehouse fence at the Team USA: Britain Bound party at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on July 26, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

The control is what drew him to fencing as a kid growing up in Wynantskill, when he went beyond just thinking it was cool to play with swords. It's what led him to shed baseball and all the other sports he played and concentrate on just one, one that would lead him to a national title at Columbia University and now to London, to the Olympics.

He's the replacement athlete for the three-man U.S. men's sabre team, and how the 24-year-old's Olympic story will go — whether he'll get to fence in the Games and be able to call himself an Olympian — is far from under his control.

And that's OK. Well, OK enough.

He's still going to the Olympics.

And it was a trip, until recent years, he never thought he'd make.

He started as a 12-year-old at Beaches Sabre Club-NY in Troy after a friend introduced him to the sport. Soon, his mother was shuttling him (and his brother Will, a successful fencer at Columbia University) to lessons in New York City.

"When I first started fencing competitively, I really liked that it was one-on-one. It was all up to me competing with my opponent. It was very physical and very tactical. It was also very technical, but I didn't really get that part of it at the time. It was just a thrill to be able to have that kind of control over myself and to do that while trying to compete with someone else," he says. "I went to a (an under-15 and under-17) tournament in Montreal. I did it for practice, but I ended up fencing really, really well in the under-17. I won three bouts in a row against people that I really respected, that I really thought were really good fencers, and I decided at that tournament I was capable, and I wanted to become a good fencer. I never dreamed it would be an NCAA championship and an Olympics at that point, but I knew that I could be a really good fencer, whatever that meant."

By 15, he wasn't sure he'd ever fence again. Weight started dropping from his 6-foot-1 frame without explanation. He went from 135 pounds to 110, and doctors struggled for concrete answers, telling his mother they thought he may be anorexic. They warned her he might need to be admitted to the hospital and put on a feeding tube. They told her he could die if the wasting away continued, and under the best circumstances, he'd face permanent damage to his body and brain.

"My mom decided that she believed in me — that I wanted to get better — and she started holding fencing over my head as a carrot to try to make me make weight goals," Spear says. He spent a year eating 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day just to make a livable weight. But this was long before gluten-free became a common labeling term and people understood celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes a bad reaction in the small intestine to gluten. When he finally was diagnosed and cut gluten out of his diet, his health and weight rebounded.

At Columbia, Spear won an NCAA individual championship in 2008. He topped ESPN The Magazine's Academic All-America selections in 2010 and was salutatorian when he graduated that year after majoring in evolutionary biology.

"After I won NCAAs in 2008, people started asking me if that meant if I was going to the Olympics," he says.

It didn't, but Spear did start to think about it. The road to the Olympics is a long and complicated one, where first, the United States has to qualify to send a team, and then the top three athletes are selected for the team based on points earned at select tournaments. The fourth-place finisher is named the replacement athlete.

Qualifying took about a year, and Spear trained hard at the New York Athletic Club in New York City, starting the first couple weeks of the qualifiers in first and working to hold on to the fourth spot by the end.

"I would say, 100 percent, a strength of Jeff is that he really takes every touch as if it's the last touch of the bout," says Michael Aufrichtig, Columbia's head fencing coach and chairman of the fencing program at the New York Athletic Club. "Every touch means something. There are some fencers that when they need to get the touch, they buckle down, but even if it's 10-0 and he's losing, Jeff will fence like it's 0-0. His focus is very strong."

Today, he's busy training — a full day that opens in the morning with a lesson and footwork drills and ends at night with video analysis — before he leaves for London next week.

Previously, that fourth athlete was considered an alternate who couldn't compete unless a team member was injured. Now, the replacement athlete can be subbed in if the coach decides it's the best strategy based on matchups or an Olympian is fencing poorly. Once the switch is made, though, the replacement athlete must stay in and the athlete he substituted for is out. "So it's not ever done lightly," Spear says, "but it's been done before."

The role takes some of the pressure off, even if Spear says he'll watch wishing he was on the fencing strip. This time, Spear can't control things from behind the mask, if he even gets to put one on and compete in London.